Book announcement-Tinicum & Eastwick: Environmental Justice and Racial Injustice in SW Philly
And a little about stumbling across a worthwhile story
This post promotes my new book. But I also wanted to take you through how I discovered the story, the path to getting a publisher interested in it, and some of the neat things that can happen along the way from idea to finished manuscript.
You can preorder Tinicum & Eastwick: Environmental Justice and Racial Injustice in Southwest Philadelphia, published by Brookline Books, with an anticipated shipping date in December of 2024.
It’s a history book written for a lay audience - people like you and me - covering two parallel grassroots movements: one that tried to save the habitat of humans, and the other that tried to save the habitats of birds. Here’s the preliminary cover, which gets everything right about the book:
I came across the origin story of the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge in 2020. Stretching across Southwest Philadelphia and Delaware County, it’s America’s first urban wildlife refuge. I also noticed nobody had written down the history of the Refuge in long form. When you’re a non-fiction writer trying to find a beat, stumbling across an untouched story feels like you hit a gold vein.
My wife and I had been to the Heinz Refuge a decade prior. Tucked in next to the Philly international airport, these remains of the extensive Tinicum marshlands1 are framed by the city skyline. The place is teeming with life. I remember watching an osprey do its freefall dive into the brackish waters to pull out a fish. It’s popular with more than wildlife. On many days, you can barely get a parking spot. Acclaimed by birders, loved by community members, the place is an “[expletive]-ing gem,” according to a guy my brother and I met on our kayaking trip there.
I learned that we almost lost these marshes. The Refuge, today a crucial waystation for migratory birds and some of the only freshwater tidal marshland in PA, had a brush with total destruction. A 1950’s-era urban redevelopment project (aka “slum clearing”), seeking to overhaul Philadelphia’s largely rural southwest, included plans to fill in the marshland with dredged silt from the Delaware River. That redevelopment project, along with destroying the marshlands, aimed to level the homes of more than 8,000 people in the racially-diverse neighborhood of Eastwick.
This was my kind of story: about land, water, and who decides where people and wildlife get to live.
The Eastwick redevelopment project would be the most expansive slum clearing effort in the country. And it was by most measures a grave injustice against the people ejected from their homes.
Just like I’d found with the Refuge and the Tinicum marshes, I found that the history of this adjacent neighborhood, called Eastwick, hadn’t been examined in book form either. There was a fair amount of academic work on Eastwick, but a lot of it was locked up behind academic journal paywalls. The story is tragic, and was largely memory-holed by the people responsible (likely out of embarrassment).
Awesome, I’d found something worth writing about. Here were two threads, environment and eminent domain, woven together into the tapestry of mid-20th century Philly.
But the subject seemed way too big to tackle without a publisher. I dabbled in it. Wrote an article for the Philly print magazine Root Quarterly. Collected some oral histories. Most notably, my wife put me onto a fun opportunity. Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, a hunting advocacy organization that I give money to, needed mentors for a hunt at the Heinz Refuge. So I sat in a hunting blind with a mentee, watching deer eat forage, the twilight scene lit by the floodlights of I-95.
It was December of 2020. I loved this story, but I didn’t know if it would go anywhere.
When Brookline Books approached me in a confluence of sheer luck and years of unknowing preparation, I had something to pitch to them. My editor Jennifer Green came to me with the good news that the publisher liked the idea. And this is what I pitched to them:
Two grassroots movements arose in opposition to that huge redevelopment/slum clearing project in the 1950’s. The movement’s goals were distinct. Demographically, they couldn’t have been more different. But both of them scrambled to stop the redevelopment project before it destroyed something invaluable.
The grassroots movement to save Eastwick from the redevelopment bulldozers was working class, racially diverse, and led by women. It was scrappy, often disorganized, but passionate. Desperately looking for someone to listen to their appeals, they struggled for years to save their homes. In the course of their story were bomb threats, accusations of communist influence, and protest marches. You couldn’t help but root for them.
The conservationists (and future environmentalists) that wanted to save the marsh came from the wealthy Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia, were overwhelmingly white men, and spent considerable political and fiscal capital on trying to save the Tinicum marshes and found a wildlife refuge. Having done some land trust work myself, I had been in these conservation circles, and knew the value of the work.
My upcoming book is the story of those two movements: the cast of colorful characters involved, their successes and failures, and what has happened in the decades since.
It’s been four years of digging up sources, talking to former residents and current activists, and grinding through prose. I spent about 8 months starting my day at 5am to write before the family woke up. Both of my children were born over the course of this project. It’s an honor to have told this story and I’m really looking forward to the knowledge that this is all written down someplace.
I’m most hopeful that the book can help people in the present.
Please consider pre-ordering the book! And I’ll let you know when it’s on Amazon etc. so you can leave a review. Thank you for everyone’s support along the way.
The Lenape called the marshlands Mahtanikunk, or “where they catch up with each other.”